Lee.org

Eat Liver. “Crazy pictures of Insane Internet”. Lots of funny pictures.

This should undo all the confusion that Grand Theft Auto caused…

According to the California Driver’s Handbook

           Right                     Wrong

This from the Federal Trade Commission: (page moved to here)

Your Access to Free Credit Reports

Soon you’ll be able to get your credit report for free. A recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months.
…

Q: How do I order my free report?

A: The three nationwide consumer reporting companies have set up one central website, toll-free telephone number, and mailing address through which you can order your free annual report. To order, click on www.annualcreditreport.com, call 877-322-8228, or complete the Annual Credit Report Request Form and mail it to: Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. The form is on the back of this brochure; or you can print it from www.ftc.gov/credit. Do not contact the three nationwide consumer reporting companies individually. They are only providing free annual credit reports through www.annualcreditreport.com, 877-322-8228, and Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281.

You may order your reports from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies at the same time, or you can order from only one or two. The law allows you to order one free copy from each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies every 12 months.

Read more about it.

I found 1 error on my Experian credit report… I had paid off a loan 3 years ago but they had it listed as being past due. It’ll take 1-2 months to fix. Better to do this kind of thing now than when I want to buy a house or something and time is more important.

update 8-8-05 Experian just got back to me and fixed the error. The loan is now “Paid, Closed”. That was easy. :-)

Source

PS. Why the hell am I posting pirate statistics? I should be moving!

My good friend Eric puts out a mailer every Friday called TGIF. He’s been doing it off and on for several years now. It’s a wonderful time waster while you’re waiting for 4:45pm to become 5pm on Friday.

Check out the tgifhumor Group on Yahoo

and sign up for the weekly list!

To give you a taste, here’s a snippet from this week’s mailer

PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals: http://mtd.com/tasty/
* * *
Rubber Ducky You¡¦re the One: (sound) http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/rubberducky.htm
* * *
“In November 2004, Microsoft’s second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my own – I was getting around a million spams per day. I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn’t quite as bad as Bill’s. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year. This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates. I’ve written a tutorial explaining why I get so much crapmail and how I deal with it.”
Tutorial: http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering
* * *
Happy 4th of July (sound): http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=1483260750
* * *
Google’s Mirror elgooG – http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi
* * *
HotHotHot The Nets Coolest Net Shop since 1994! – http://hothothot.com It¡¦s not what you think, shame on you, although you should handle with care.

Wow. When I went looking for a newspaper to find an apartment in the Bay Area, I came up extremely short. Newspaper listings were very slim and the ones that were in the paper didn’t look very good. That is when I realized that, in the Bay Area, print is dead.

If you want to find a job, a place to live, a relationship, a couch, most things… you go to Craigslist.

Now, taking this whole inter-web thing one logical step further: www.housingmaps.com

It’s amazing. It’s easy to use. It’s…. obvious. After years of nobody thinking to put all these kinds of elements together, this match is (in hindsight) perfectly obvious and perfectly terrific.

The days of print classifieds for a variety of items are numbered.

Is it live or Memorex?
This guy created some amazing CGI/real-life crossover images. He says, “…and anyone with a camera and a relativly fast computer can make this.”

I almost believe him. It’s still astounding that some guy with a computer and a little drive can make these images, which are more realistic than the best movie special effects from 5 years ago.

He goes on to mention

All you need is:

A digital camera

A reflective sphere (which you see in a few photos) to capture the lighting of the real-life scene which you want to composite your model into.

A small program called HDRShop.

Big program called 3D Studio Max.

and finally you need a good renderer such as VRay.

Then of course you need the tools to get HL2 models into 3dsmax: GFScape, a HL2 Model importer, and a texuture and model converter

Tutorial

(He neglects to mention the approximate $5k price tage of the software, but hey)

Got’cher nose!

From Masterreplicas.com describing their high end light saber replica

Durable yet light chrome plated aluminum body looks and feels like a real lightsaber.

Just like a real one, eh?

From the AOL Instant Messenger site:

If either you, or the person you want to Video IM with are behind a firewall and are having problems getting Video IM to operate, work with your Internet Service Provider, your company’s system administrator or modify your firewall software yourself to open ports 1024 through 5000.

Open ports 1024-5000 inclusive?

Yeah. I think not.

I’ll find another way to do a video chat.

update 5-4-05: Yahoo Messenger’s webcam system is excellent. Terrific UI, excellent implementation. And the rest of the Yahoo Messenger system has a lot of nice bells and whistles without too much annoying advertising.